NMCI limits e-mail attachments

Navy Marine Corps Intranet Web site

Officials at the Navy Marine Corps Intranet director's office today announced all attachments to NMCI e-mail will be limited to a maximum of 10M in size, starting April 1.

The size limit is being imposed to give NMCI users improved e-mail service and faster response time, according to a statement released by the director's office. Users who need to share files in excess of 10M can use a shared drive. Also, exceptions can be made for users who must exceed that limit, according to Navy Capt. Chris Christopher, NMCI's deputy director for future operations.

"We realize that there will need to be exceptions to this policy," Christopher said. "Command center watch officers, for example, should always be waived."

Unit commanders will be responsible for granting exceptions and insuring that proper procedures are followed, he added.

Christopher said that 10M is a higher size limit than that imposed on other government and commercial networks.

"Five megabytes is considered the norm by many organizations, but 10M will support the majority of user needs in NMCI, so we chose the larger size limit," he said. The real problem with e-mail attachments comes when you simultaneously send several users a large file, clogging the system at the firewall, said Walter Dyer, deputy director for customer relations management in the NMCI office.

"The mail gets replicated at the server," Dyer said. "The firewall is already a chokepoint because it sniffs every bit of every e-mail."

NMCI saves every e-mail for a certain time period so a storage issue exists as well, he explained.